Part 108 opened the skies. Your companion computer is the new attack surface.

A drone's intelligence rides on a small Linux computer that plans, sees, and moves data. As Part 108 turns beyond-visual-line-of-sight from a waiver into routine operations, that companion computer — and the ground station behind it — is the host you most need to observe and protect.

The questions drone teams are actually asking

Autonomy just went mainstream in the airspace, and the security questions moved with it from the airframe to the compute:

• Under BVLOS, no human is in the loop moment-to-moment. What governs the onboard agent when it acts on its own?
• Where is our mission imagery and telemetry going once the companion computer starts calling cloud models?
• Our ground-control server coordinates the whole fleet — how do we contain a compromised agent there?
• Can we show a commercial or public-safety customer that sensitive payload data stayed inside our rules?

The landscape: BVLOS goes routine, identity goes mandatory

The FAA's Part 108 — finalized in late 2025 and published in 2026 — is the most significant drone rulemaking since Part 107, replacing the patchwork of BVLOS waivers with a standardized framework for highly automated operations. It unlocks long-range delivery, infrastructure inspection, and precision agriculture at scale, and it assumes autonomous decision-making without stick-and-rudder input.

Two hard requirements come with it. Remote ID (14 CFR Part 89) is fully enforced — every drone must broadcast operator location, drone location, altitude, velocity, and identity; if it is not broadcasting, it is effectively grounded. Detect-and-Avoid systems are the technical core of BVLOS authorization. Meanwhile the American Drone Security Act has pushed many foreign-made drones out of federally funded projects — raising the bar on supply-chain and data trust.

The through-line: as drones make more decisions on their own and broadcast more about themselves, the onboard compute becomes both more autonomous and more scrutinized. What that compute connects to, and what data it moves, is now an operational and compliance question.

Where the real risk lives — the companion computer

Vantio does not fly the drone or own its flight-safety envelope. We protect the compute you own — the companion computer in the air and the mission servers on the ground — where AI planners and data pipelines run. For aerial teams the sensitive material is the payload: imagery, mapping data, and telemetry. An ungoverned agent on the companion computer or ground station is exactly where that data can leak, or where a connection can reach somewhere it should not.

BVLOS sharpens this. When a human is not directly in the loop, the onboard agent's autonomy is the operation — so seeing where it connects, stripping sensitive payload on the outbound path, and stopping a forbidden move on Linux you enroll is the difference between autonomy you can defend and autonomy you have to hope about.

How Vantio answers these questions

For a drone operator, Optics runs free on companion computers and ground stations to show what onboard agents do. Gate keeps payload data and destinations inside policy. Phantom Engine protects the mission server where a single misbehaving agent could reach the whole fleet.

What Vantio does — and does not — do

• Does: observe and govern AI and LLM agents on companion computers and ground-control servers you own.
• Does: strip sensitive payload and refuse unauthorized destinations on the agent's outbound path; stop a forbidden move on a Linux host you enroll.
• Does not: provide Remote ID broadcast, Detect-and-Avoid, or flight-control safety — those are airframe and avionics functions.
• Does not: cover browser-based paths. Vantio wraps agent processes and model-API egress on the hosts you run, not in-browser traffic.

Get started

Optics is free visibility inside the agent process you wrap. Gate applies the rules you set. Phantom Engine protects Linux hosts you enroll — a Helm DaemonSet on Kubernetes you operate, or a Linux daemon on standalone machines. Talk to sales when you need governance on top.

Sources

• FAA Unmanned Aircraft Systems
• 14 CFR Part 89 Remote ID
• FAA Part 108 BVLOS framework (finalized 2025, published 2026)